News on China's scientific and technological development.

Bltizo said:

Huawei, along with lenovo are probably china's best bets for getting well known brands. Recently they've shown the products which are competitive, now it's a matter of stretching that quality a bit further and reinventing the brand a little.

Click to expand...

My wife bought a Lenovo Laptop while attending beijing uni a couple yrs back. It developed a minor faultback hereand she had a problem getting it fixed. Lenovo after sales service sucks.

When you go into those major computer shops that are Chinese owned in Auckland, one hardly sees "Lenovo" products commanding centre stage. ( really marketed)


I bought a budget Huawei smart phone about 2yrs ago from the Warehouse for $199 which came with $200 of usage time so it was essentiall free. All my sons from china mates looked at it and laughed, but it still works. Not much good for video viewing for games etc as its a bit laggy, but other than that , nothing wrong with it especially if all one wanted was the android .O.S. for texting and making calls and the occassional gps use.

Sometime back HEndrick posted a article on Huawei products/ including phones. IN it it mentioned that the senior execs preferred using better spec. phones, guess it meant iphones and the like.

Youll know HUawei phones "have arrived" when those same senior exes use company made phones. Unless the big "kahuna" had innsisted that everybody use company made phones. It certainly wouldn't have been a good look when you go out and while giving some prospective retail chain " the hard sell" on what your company makes, only to be seen to pull out a opposition brand when taking an incoming call.

If those Huawei "Ascend" phones get good wraps Ill buy one.

bladerunner said:

My wife bought a Lenovo Laptop while attending beijing uni a couple yrs back. It developed a minor faultback hereand she had a problem getting it fixed. Lenovo after sales service sucks.

When you go into those major computer shops that are Chinese owned in Auckland, one hardly sees "Lenovo" products commanding centre stage. ( really marketed)

Click to expand...

Yes I've noticed the lack of lenovo in nz too... but lenovo are apparently pretty big in other countries. Weird that they're 2nd largest in terms of shipping but hardly see them here.
And from the internet I've garnered a company's after sale service can vary, and one person can get a great snappy replacement while another, a crappy one.

I bought a budget Huawei smart phone about 2yrs ago from the Warehouse for $199 which came with $200 of usage time so it was essentiall free. All my sons chinese mates looked at it and laughed, but it still works. NOt much good for video viewing for games etc as its a bit laggy, but other than that , nothing wrong with it especially if all one wanted was the android .O.S. for texting and making calls and the occassional gps use.

Sometime back HEndrick posted a article on Huawei products/ including phones. IN it it mentioned that the senior execs preferred using better spec. phones, guess it meant iphones and the like. Youll know HUawei phones have arrived when those same senior exes use company made phones. Unless the big "kahuna" had innsisted that everybody use company made phones. It certainly wouldn't have been a good look when you go out and while giving some prospective company the hard sell on what your company makes, only to be seen to pull out a opposition brand when taking an incoming call.

Click to expand...

To be fair with their latest unveiling at CES and MWC they just created a half dozen smart phones that are competitive with the latest iphone. Some of the quad core ones like d quad at MWC are even better than iphone in speed, battery life, screen etc. So if it's purely out of a functionality point of view I'd expect those same executives to use d quads within this year. Huawei have really made a massive leap from low end smartphones to top end. Now the ball is in samsung, and apple's court to see how their galaxy s3 and iphone 5's measure up against these new quad phones from HTC, huawei, LG and even ZTE.

But the way it's looking, huawei at least looks to want to undercut rivals with a competitive product, and the sheer price difference could play into their favour. The problem is whether their phones will be branded as huawei to improve brand recognition, which is arguably the largest hurdles for them and ZTE.




Btw richard yu chariman of huawei said they expect to price the new d quad at some 400-500 euros. Not sure what kind of contract or conditions there are with that however, or how it compares to galaxy s2, iphone 4s and other quad core phones at MWC.

Bltizo said:

Huawei, along with lenovo are probably china's best bets for getting well known brands. Recently they've shown the products which are competitive, now it's a matter of stretching that quality a bit further and reinventing the brand a little.

Click to expand...

ohh well some other Chinese companies are already well known brand, quite a lot actually. Name just a few Haier, Sanny, Chery, Great Wall, BYD, etc

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China's industrial authority said Tuesday that it will introduce trials for methanol-fueled cars in three provincial level regions starting this month, signaling the world's second largest economy's resolution to boost greener economic growth.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in a statement that it will launch the trials in western Chinese province of Shaanxi, the northern province of Shanxi and the municipality of Shanghai over the next two to three years.

The statement said the three local authorities should carry out the trials of methanol-fueled cars on a prudent basis and put safety first.

After two or three years, the three regions should finish evaluations on the feasibility, reliability, economic efficiency, safety and environmental impacts of methanol-fueled cars, the MIIT said.

The ministry also expected the trials to help establish standard criteria for methanol-fueled cars, provide solutions to modify, build and manage necessary infrastructure, as well as shape industry policies.

The government will decide once the outcomes are known whether to expand or prolong the trials after the two-or-three-year period, it said.

The three chosen regions have all accumulated abundant experience in developing methanol-related technologies including methanol-fueled cars, the MIIT said.

For instance, the coal-rich Shanxi province has a total of over 40 methanol fueling stations, and its neighboring Shaanxi province has built seven methanol gasoline blending centers.

According to the statement, the MIIT started research on methanol-fueled vehicles in 2009 in response to the rapid development of China's car industry, increasingly tight supplies of crude oil, as well as the requirements of energy conservation and emission reductions.

Alternative energy is one of the seven strategic sectors receiving government supports, as stipulated in China's 12th Five Year Plan of 2011-2015.

The government plans to pump 10 trillion yuan (1.59 trillion US dollars) into the alternative energy sector together with other six sectors, including biological technology, new-generation information technology and new-type materials, over the next five years.

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The country took another big step on Wednesday in its move to develop a domestic aviation engine industry by 2020 with the groundbreaking for an engine assembly and testing center.

The center, set to be fully operational in a decade, will be a hub for testing spare parts and maintaining the overall performance of an indigenous aircraft engine.

According to Feng Jinzhang, head of research and development for the project, researchers have finished the comprehensive design of the engine and have just started work on components.

"The product will need to go through a series of experiments even after coming off the assembly line. There is no fixed timetable but we hope to see the engine put into use in 2020," Feng said.

The center, in which 8 billion yuan ($1.27 billion) has been invested, is a wholly owned subsidiary of AVIC Commercial Aircraft Engine Co Ltd, in which Aviation Industry Corp of China holds a controlling stake.

AVIC is a State-owned conglomerate that develops and mass-produces military aircraft and components for military and civilian planes.

The move means that Shanghai will become the nation's aircraft manufacturing base, Zhang Yujin, vice-president of ACAE, said at a news conference.

In the Shanghai Lingang Industrial Park, the 0.8-square-kilometer center has six zones, including areas for experimentation, assembly and maintenance.Zhang said the assembly line will be completed by 2014 and the company aims to mass-produce engines by 2020. He said a repair center will be finished by 2013 and a customer center is due for completion the following year.

ACAE was established in 2009 to develop engines for 150-seat aircraft, allowing the conglomerate to end its reliance on foreign firms. The company set up its research and development center in Shanghai in 2010.

The domestic engine project is referred to as "China Heart", referring to the engine's role as the most critical component of an aircraft and one that takes up 20 percent of the total cost of a plane.

China imports all of its commercial plane engines, which has held it back in the global aviation market.

The domestic jumbo, the C919, will initially use imported engines when the plane makes its scheduled maiden flight in 2014.

CFM International, a 50-50 venture between Safran of France and General Electric Co of the United States, won the bid to supply engines for the plane project, a contract initially worth $10 billion.

But ACAE has vowed to domestically produce C919 engines once it masters the necessary techniques.As part of this drive, ACAE is recruiting some 300 aviation professionals globally to fill positions ranging from engineering to technology support.More than 25 percent of the current 515 employees have worked or studied overseas.

It is an "ambitious" goal to manufacture engines by 2020, as existing passenger-jet makers work to improve efficiency while lowering costs, said Li Lei, an aviation analyst with CITIC Securities Co Ltd.

"China lags far behind Western countries in basic disciplines such as aerodynamics and materials science, which are intractably linked to the craft of making jet engines, " Li said.

Even if the target is achieved in 2020, Li noted, the technology won't rival that used in developed countries.

Currently, only the US, Britain, France and Russia can make their own aircraft engines

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China is expected to use 12 million metric tons of aviation biofuels by 2020, accounting for 30 percent of the country's total use of jet fuel, according to Li Jian, deputy director of the Civil Aviation Administration of China.

The market value of jet biofuels will exceed 120 billion yuan ($19 billion) by 2020, Li said on Tuesday. He said the new carbon-emissions tax the European Union is imposing on airlines will prompt China to develop jet biofuels, which will be put into wide commercial use before 2020, when the country is expected to be using more than 40 million metric tons of jet fuel a year.

Li said China now has the technology needed to produce jet biofuels and only needs to produce the substances more cheaply to sell them commercially.

China currently consumes about 20 million metric tons of jet fuel a year.

Jet biofuel, made from renewable resources, is considered to be cleaner for the environment, giving off less carbon during production than traditional jet fuels.

Statistics from UOP LLC, a subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc, suggest that the use of biofuels can help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by as much as 85 percent below the level released by burning fossil fuels.

Because of the aviation industry's greater emission of greenhouse gases, by 2020 the Civil Aviation Administration of China wants to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions of greenhouse gas by 22 percent below what they were in 2005.

China Petrochemical Corp, or Sinopec Group, which contributes 73 percent of the country's output of jet fuel, announced on Tuesday that it had successfully produced jet biofuel at its chemical plant in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province.

The company, which began researching and developing aviation biofuels in 2009, has applied to the aviation administration to undergo an aircraft airworthiness examination. The administration has not said when a decision on the application will be released.

Unless the aviation administration concludes that aviation biofuels are safe, they may not be used in commercial flights.

Sinopec's rival, China National Petroleum Corp, the country's biggest oil producer, delivered 15 tons of aviation oil last June to help Air China Ltd to test out flights powered by biofuel. The fuel had been extracted from the inedible plant jatropha, which is grown in Southwest China.

Air China made a demonstration flight in October 2011 using a fuel that was half made of petroleum-based fuel and half of an aviation biofuel produced from jatropha. The fuel, which was used in one engine of a Boeing 747-400 aircraft, was made by the China National Petroleum Corp and Honeywell's UOP.

China National Petroleum Corp plans to build a refinery to produce 60,000 tons of the biofuel a year by 2014.

Facing pressures to conserve energy and reduce carbon dioxide emissions, the aviation administration is encouraging more companies to help develop aviation biofuels, Li said.

Here in Houston, bio-fuel is growing ever more popular that new companies are poping up along the gulf coast because with demands and purchasing coming from China.

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Zhangjiang hi-tech park, sometimes referred to as Shanghai's Silicon Valley, is stepping up efforts to recruit top talent from across China.

Established in 1992 as a state-level hi-tech industrial development zone, the park's main focus areas include integrated circuits, biomedicine, information technology and low-carbon energy sources.

The park announced on Feb. 28 the addition of 20 "Zhangjiang talents" to its rapidly growing pool of employees. The new experts will receive 500,000 to 1 million yuan (US$80,000 to US$160,000) in housing and subsidies, and will be given special privileges with respect to residency and their children's schooling.

Most of the 20 "talents" were born after 1970, and the youngest is only 29. They were chosen after a rigorous selection process that did not set any minimums for academic achievement or experience, although some had previously worked as corporate executives or professional engineers.

The park committee's deputy director, William Ding, says the new recruits are part of a core "talent assembly plan" aimed at pulling in experts from all key hi-tech industries. The plan intends to bolster the existing talent pool rather than train new staff from scratch. Ding says the park is targeting those who have returned from overseas with academic achievement, as well as successful entrepreneurs and corporate executives.

The park is currently offering additional staff incentives such as rental of 50- to 80-square-meter apartments for just 1,000 yuan (US$160) per month.

Zhangjiang hi-tech park is already one of the most concentrated areas of high-tech experts in the world. In 2011, the park recorded income of 370 billion yuan (US$58.7 billion), an increase of 21% from the previous year

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Chinese leading construction equipment builder Sany Heavy Industry Co. Ltd. plans to invest 900 million yuan (143 million dollars) in a joint venture with Austria’s mobile crane giant Palfinger AG, as it looks to accelerate its global expansion.

The Changsha, Hunan province-based JV, Sany Palfinger SPV Equipment Co., has a registered capital of 300 million yuan and is 50 percent owned by both parties, Sany said on Tuesday.

Sany and Palfinger will also invest as much as 4 million euros in setting up Palfinger Sany, a Salzburg-based sales unit of the JV.

Sany said in the announcement that the cooperation with Palfinger is a major step forward in the company’s drive to enter the global mobile crane market and deepen its global footprint, and will raise the two companies’ ability to innovate.

The China JV will start this year and become fully operational by 2013, Palfinger said in a separate statement, while the European sales unit will be fully operational by the end of this year.

Palfinger is a pioneer in the global crane market with over 1,500 sales units across 180 countries and regions. Its sales revenue totaled 850 million euros in 2011.

Palfinger chief executive officer Herbert Ortner said last August that expansion into China was a top priority, and that the company hoped to make it the company’s biggest market within the next 5-6 years despite slower construction growth in China amid government measures to cool off the property market.

Official housing data for January released on Feb. 18 showed that prices did not increase in any of the 70 cities monitored from a month earlier, while prices fell in 48 of the cities. That was the poorest result in at least a year.

At the beginning of this month, Sany announced its takeover of German engineering firm Putzmeister Holding GmbH in a 360 million euro deal, its first overseas purchase, coinciding with similar interest expressed by other domestic machinery makers.

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ZTE (763) Corp., China’s second-biggest maker of phone equipment, wants to become one of the world’s top three makers of network infrastructure in three years, said Xu Ming, the company’s vice president of wireless products.

ZTE plans to use its footprint in emerging economies in Africa and Asia to win contracts for faster fourth-generation wireless networks, Xu said in an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week.

The Chinese company ranked sixth among telecommunications infrastructure makers in 2010 with a 7.2 percent market share, according to the most recent Gartner Inc. (IT) estimates. To win the third spot behind Ericsson AB and Huawei Technologies Co., Shenzhen-based ZTE will have to overtake Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), with a 13.3 percent share, Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO) with 9.4 percent and Nokia Siemens Networks with 8.4 percent based on the estimates.

“We are growing stronger and stronger in research and development and in the market, and we are confident to become the No. 3,” Xu said. “In the following two to three years we can, in every region, be a top three provider for all infrastructure. Our chances are climbing with 4G.”

ZTE rose 3.6 percent to HK$23.30 as of 10:53 a.m. in Hong Kong trading, the biggest intraday gain since Feb. 22. The stock has declined 4.3 percent this year, compared with the 50 percent gain in the Paris-traded stock of Alcatel-Lucent.

Stronger economic growth in emerging markets and less developed networks mean phone companies in those countries are more eager to award deals to supply the population with wireless connections, Xu said.

Mobile Ambition

“ZTE’s technology is pretty solid and very innovative but to move past Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) and others they would have to build their service business,” said Bettina Tratz-Ryan, a Gartner analyst based in Germany. “Especially in new network rollouts around 4G, operators tend to evaluate their suppliers by their ability to help in design and implementation.”

The Chinese company also aims to become the third-largest vendor of mobile devices after winning the No. 4 spot in the final quarter of last year based on Gartner figures. ZTE sold 18.9 million devices for a market share of 4 percent in the period, behind Nokia Oyj (NOK1V), Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) and Apple Inc. (AAPL) ZTE’s smartphone sales may double this year as it gains market share in Europe, North America, Brazil and Japan, the company said in January.

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China has taken another step in localizing key nuclear power equipment for its steadily growing nuclear energy program.

A key piece of equipment for the passive core cooling system of the AP1000 -- a two-loop pressurized water reactor manufactured by Westinghouse Electric Company -- has been developed by China's Dongfang Electric Corporation.

The equipment, China's first domestically produced passive residual heat exchanger, was shipped from southern Guangdong Province to the Haiyang Nuclear Station in northern Shandong Province on Feb. 29.

The heat exchanger has a direct bearing on the safety of the reactor, a Dongfang Electric spokesman said in Guangzhou.

"The new heat exchanger produced by our company is a step forward in the localization of nuclear equipment," the spokesman said.

The Haiyang Nuclear Station, with a total investment of 80 billion yuan (12.7 billion U.S. dollars), plans to build six reactor units. Dongfang Electric Corporation will supply heat exchangers and stabilizers to two units.

China's first nuclear power station at Qinshan in Zhejiang Province was based on Chinese design and construction. Since then, several nuclear plants have used reactor technologies from France and the United States, among others.

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China on Friday completed a system designed to monitor the movement of the Earth's crust and predict earthquakes, according to sources with the China Earthquake Administration.


Based on satellite navigation, it involves a network of 260 constant observing stations and 2,000 part-time observing stations with data-processing technology, and will also be used for weather forecasting and scientific research, among other purposes.

The 35 experts in charge of the project agreed that the outcome is a comprehensive, precise and versatile geoscientific resource, and that its information should be shared.

The new network joins the U.S. Plate Boundary Observation system and Japan's GEONE as the most advanced means of observing the movement of the Earth's crust.

China started the project in December of 2007, with a total investment of 524 million yuan (83.2 million U.S. dollars), and it was jointly carried out by official bodies including the China Earthquake Administration, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation.